Well, McCully did promise today to cut $40 million from MFAT today. Motive from the inside, perhaps?

I'm starting through the emails, and they reveal a lot of arrogance from the minister's office, plenty of deprecation of his Pacific counterparts, cosy Australian relationships, and general ignorance towards foreign aid.

"Wouldn't it have made more sense to sit on this account which they have already compromised and continue to grab information from it?"

Not if (a) it's true that "McCully had asked that official emails be forwarded to that account while he was overseas in April last year" and the good stuff had dried up (that quote is from the Stuff article that you link), or (b) McCully changed his password.

It's quite funny, but understandable, that you'd spend more time wondering about claims made by purported Russian hackers, and trying to piece together their real identity, than consider that someone, somewhere, actually changed their Xtra password.

Is the use of a private email address some kind of OIA work-around? Remember how Sarah Palin (infamously) used Gmail for certain communications, in the belief that she would therefore be outside existing retention and disposal schedules for records-keeping, and could essentially do what she liked and be exempt from FOI requests? I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here, but there are possible motives for the use of a non-governmental email address that go beyond simple incompetence or cluelessness.

I would like an opposition politician to ask a parliamentary question about what disciplinary measures would be taken against a senior civil servant who sent confidential/secret communications to a private email address, and then ask how McCully has been disciplined.

But nothing is off the record. if the informationis held by the Minister in their official capacity, then its official information and subject to the OIA, no matter what format or storage medium it is in. Hell, the OIA even applies to information in Minister’s heads, which means you can tell them to write stuff down, and offer to extract it surgically if they refuse.

“Private” email accounts only hide information if the Minister is going to break the law. And then their staff should be having a quiet word to the Ombudsman about it.

I would think there are some serious questions for the Member of Parliament for the Wairarapa (John Hayes) to answer. If you have never heard of him, you might remember him as the candidate in the 2008 campaign who, in his SUV, almost ran down a young protester.

For a bit more context, John Allen is also Chair of the Employers' Disability Network - a group of business people promoting the employment of disabled people. Never met him, but I've heard he does good work with EDN. He was appointed by the currrent government to head MFAT (previously at NZ Post), rather than someone who had come up through the diplomatic ranks.

I know the same rules don’t apply. That doesn’t matter in making a political point, namely that McCully has done something that would count as poor performance and warrant discipline for just about anyone else.

The SMBC cartoon leaves out the pertinent fact that there are quite a few people who hack as in panel A. They just mostly work for states and security companies. For any given individual's email account, panel B will probably do nicely.

It's quite possible that the "mindless wasteful admin crap" was simply Finance requiring him to fill in his expense forms properly. McCully and his ilk regard "aid" as "investment" and demand a financial return on it.